"Raising the Dead" by Andy Dougan

A history focused on the medics and scientists who tried to reanimate dead people using electricity, both before and after the publication of Frankenstein. This book focuses particularly on the work of Andrew Ure, a Glaswegian anatomist, who experimented on the newly-hanged cadaver of condemned murdered Matthew Clydesdale in November 1819, months after the publication of Mary Shelley's novel, but it also looks at previous work, for example by Galvani and his nephew Aldini, both of whom believed in 'animal electricity', and by Mary Shelley's husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was an amateur electrical experimenter and a believer in Paracelsus and a follower of the work of Humphrey Davy, who invented electrolysis. Gruesome as it was, this work has led to the invention of the defibrillator.

For me there was too much emphasis on the Ure-Clydesdale experiment (we have a full description of the murder and the trial) and not enough on the science, but the later chapters contained plenty of interest.

Selected quotes:

• “Graham would deliver lectures on sexual satisfaction as his Goddesses of Youth and Health, a succession of barely-clad, nubile young things, worked the crowd encouraging them to part with their cash.” (Ch 7)
• “Shelley continued to read Humphrey Davy and ... remained convinced that ‘electrical fluid’ was the all-animating force of life and could hold all of its secrets. He referred to the human body as a lump of electrified clay.” (Ch 7)
• “Positive electricity made vision sharper and red-hued while negative electricity made it blurred and bluish.” (Ch 9)

August 2022; 201 pages

The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes also considers the scientists who might have inspired Frankenstein but he settles for Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776 - 1810)

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Age of Wonder" by Richard Holmes

Richard Holmes is well known (though not by me)  for his biographies of Shelley and Coleridge and here he moves from the romantic poets to the scientists of the romantic era. He endeavours to trace the ancestry of our modern image of "the scientist": he examines the point at which the natural philosopher at home with both the arts and the sciences (eg Herschel, musician turned astronomer; Davy, poet turned chemist; Coleridge, dilettante scientist turned poet) was replaced by the two persons of Snow's Two Cultures; he describes the genesis of the myth of the mad scientist in Victor Frankenstein; and he charts the growing atheism inherent in the discoveries that made a Creator more and more remote.

But best of all the book has vivid stories and personalities which Holmes brilliantly brings to life (even though he quotes far too much from Davy's poetry!)

He starts with Joseph Banks with Captain Cook savouring the delights of that Pacific paradise, Tahiti. We then move onto the story of William Herschel and his discovery of Uranus. Ballooning comes next, then Mungo Park explores Africa; Sir Humphrey Davy invesitigates Laughing Gas; Mary Shelley writes Frankenstein; Davy invents the Safety Lamp and then falls out with everyone including his wife and Michael Faraday and finally the era closes with Charles Babbage and young Sir John Herschel leading towards Charles Darwin.

Here is a selection of my favourite bits which I marked.

p83: In 1772, William Herschel, having decided to grind his own lenses to make a reflecting telescope in Bath (where he conducts concerts in the Pump Rooms) buys grinding and polishing tools from John Michel, "a Quaker astronomer who had retired to Bath nursing some strange, unacceptable ideas - such as the existence of 'black holes' in space from which light itself could not escape".

p94: Perhaps there is room for a History of Scientific Error which could show that mistakes in Science are at least as influential to the progress of right ideas as the triumphs. In a footnote, Holmes points out that Romantic Science created three myths: the lone scientific genius, the Eureka moment and the Frankenstein nightmare.

p101: In 1781, Herschel having discovered Uranus he went to London to meet "wealthy Deptford astronomer Alexander Aubert" and to dine with Sir Joseph Banks at the "Mitre Club, a tavern much favoured by Dr Johnson." NB: Herschel used lenses made by Dollond whose company, founded in the 1750s, later grew into Dollond and Aitchison!

p106: The publisher Joseph Johnson of St Paul's Churchyard not only published an influential History of Astronomy by Bonnycraft but also published William Blake, William Godwin, William Wordsworth, Mary Wollstonecraft and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

p111: On 31st July 1782 the Herschel's went to live in Datchet. Later they moved to Slough.

p113: In 1811 Keats won A History of Astronomy by Bonnycraft as a school prize; he then went on to compose On looking into Chapman's Homer in 1816 in which he describes Herschel's discovery of Uranus: "Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/ When a new planet swims into his ken"

p132 On 1st December 1783 (ten days after the Montgolfier hot air balloon) the first hydrogen ballon was launched by Dr Charles from the Tuileries in front of a crowd estimated at 400,000; Benjamin Franklin, US ambassador in Paris watched it and was asked what use it was: he replied: "What's the use of a newborn baby?" I previousl;y believed this to be something Faraday said.

p152: Jean-Pierre Blanchard, the first man to cross the English Channel by balloon in 1785, later founded a "Balloon Academy on the Stockwell Road in Vauxhall".

p156: Napoleon took 4 balloons with him to Egypt in 1798 but they were destroyed by Nelson at the Battle of Aboukir.

p198 Pierre Laplace who, in 1799, used Herschel's nebula theory of star formation to explain the formation of the solar system, was asked by Napoleon where God was in his work and replied "Citizen First Consul, I have no need of that hypothesis."

p199: Herschel also discovered infra-red light in 1800.

p250: In 1797 Gregory Watt, son of James, lodged with Grace Davy, mother of Humphrey. Later Gregory would pass Humphrey's name on to his dad who i n turn recommended him to Dr Thomas Beddoes of Cliftonm near Bristol who then employed Humphrey as lab assistant at his (slightly quackish) pneumatic hospital in which Humphrey investigated the treatment of diseases using gases including Carbon Monoxide (which nearly killed Davy) and Laughing Gas (which made his reputation).

p291:  By 1803 Davy had moved to London and was giving incredibl;y popular science lectures at the Royal Institution (one included the concept of the carbon cycle). These were so popular that Albemarle Street became the first One-Way street to control carriage congestion.

p295: Humphrey Davy gave 5 Bakerian lectures at the Royal Society between 1806 and 1810. These lectures had been founded in 1775 by Daniel Defoe's son-in-law. In the first lecture Davy argued that the different forms of electricity (in Leyden jars, and generated by Voltaic piles, stormclouds, electric eels, and by friction) were all the same and were a form of bipolar (postive and negative) energy.

p308: surgeon John Hunter dissected bodies in Great Windmill Street in Soho.

p328-330: Victor Frankenstein may have been based on Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776 - 1810) who invented the dry-cell storage battery and discovered ultra-violet light in 1803 worked at Jena using huge Voltaic piles to galvanise animal corpses. He then moved to Munich to continue experiments that were described as "most convincing" and "disgusting"; abandoned his wife and three children and died penniless and insane in 1810 aged 33.

p338: Humphrey Davy married Jane Apreece who, during her lonely 1st marriage, went to Geneva and made friends with Madame de Stael becoming the heroine of Corinne.

p383: Greenland pack-ice melted in 1815 and was believed to be a precursor of climate change.

p420: Andrew Crosse, who lived at Fyne Court in the Quantocks, had installed in his ballroom an "'extensive philosophic apparatus' with which he later claimed to have generated spontaneous life forms .... It contained large, gleaming electrical condensers, which were linked to a network of copper wires strung through the trees .... designed to pick up massive charges of static or 'atmospheric' electricity. The largest condenser was marked with a blasphemous warning notice: Noli Me Tangere - that is,m 'Do not Touch Me' .... the risen Christ's first words to Mary Magdalene".  So he could have been the original of Dr Frankenstein.

p441: Sir John Herschel wrote a philosophy of natural science in which he reckoned the scientific method to be tripartite: the inductive gathering of facts, the emergence of a general hypothesis and the testing of that hypothesis.

p448: Coleridge, aged 60, attended the third meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Cambridge in 1833.

p460: David Brewster, more famous for his work on polarisation, invented the kaleidoscope.

A brilliant book.

Januray 2010; 469 pages.

I have now read Holmes' biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: also worth a read!

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein" by Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd has written many books, both fiction and non-fiction. My favourite was his first, Hawksmoor. This present book is one of my least favourite.

There is a twist right at the end but it was heavy going. Ackroyd weaves a story about the fictional character Frankenstein which purports to explain how the novel, Frankenstein, was written. The action oscillates between Geneva, Oxford and London. There are deaths, resurrectionists and a certain amount of philosophical discussion about the nature of God's act of creation and how men might 'Play God'.

But it is mostly tedious stuff. In my review of Thames: Sacred River in this wiki I complain of Ackroyd's tendency to list; this present novel seems like a list of all his research (it also advertises a number of his other books!):

• Frankenstein comes from the village of Chamonix, at the foot of Mont Blanc. Mary Shelley visited Chamonix and set an encounter between Frankenstein and his monster here.
• Frankenstein meets Shelley (whom he calls Bysshe) in Oxford shortly before Shelley is sent down for writing (anonymously) "The Necessity for Atheism".
• Subsequently, Frankenstein goes with Shelley to London where he meets Daniel Westbrook and his sister Harriet. Shelley later elopes with Harriet. Harriet was of a much higher class in real life than in the book but she did become Shelley's first wife.
• In London, Frankenstein attends a lecture given by Sir Humphrey Davy, whose work on galvanising cats he has already read.
• Shelley and Frankenstein watch a theatrical production of Melmoth the Wanderer, a gothic novel about a man who sells his soul to the devil for an extra 150 years of life and then spends the time trying to find someone to relieve him of this burden. Oscar Wilde later used the pseudonym Sebastian Melmoth after his enforced sojourn in Reading Gaol. Ackroyd has previously written The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde.
• Frankenstein hears of famous anatomist John Hunter whose life parallels that of Frankenstein: they both live for some time on Jermyn Street and they both experiment on dogs. Whilst dissecting corpses Frankenstein meets Jack Keat (John Keats) who has consumption. Keats however studied at Guys rather than St Thomas Hospital (as in this book) and Hunter studied at St George Hospital.
• Frankenstein reads Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther", a book about unrequited love.
• On page 165 the monster points at Frankenstein and declaims "Thou art the man" which is the title of an Edgar Allen Poe story. Ackroyd wrote a biography of Poe.
• Frankenstein meets Shelley with new girlfriend Mary Godwin (who wrote Frankenstein) at Marlow. They go boating on the Thames. Mary sees the face of the monster at her window, although she initially thinks this is a dream. Mary asks where the source of the Thames is and a debate ensues. Later she mentions the theory that the Thames and the Rhine were once the same river. Ackroyd researched these in his previous book Thames: Sacred River.
• Frankenstein meets Byron and Dr Polidori. They will be present at the house party when Mary Shelley writes Frankenstein. Polidori writes The Vampyre, the first English vampire novel, as a result of this house party. Byron uses the phrase "The Modern Prometheus" to Shelley; this will become the subtitle of Frankenstein. Polidori talks to Frankenstein about the Golem (a monster made of clay and given life by Kabbalistic incantations); this presumably links to Ackroyd's earlier novel Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem. Limehouse is, of course, the district where, in this novel, Frankenstein's laboratory lies.
• The penultimate act of the story takes place in the Villa Diodati where the famous ghost story telling competition is held. Later Shelley is drowned as he was in real life (though not till 1822)
• On page 262, Byron quotes from Paradise Lost. Ackroyd has previously written Milton in America.

A disappointment from a gifted writer. Perhaps he is writing too much these days.

Mary Shelley's original Frankenstein is much better!

May 2009, 296 pages